To Kill a Mockingbird - Maycomb County

David Pearce

To Kill a Mockingbird is set in Maycomb County, an imaginary district in Southern Alabama. The time is the early 1930s, the years of the Great Depression when poverty and unemployment were widespread in the United States.

Maycomb is home to the main characters including Atticus (The head of the Finch family household), Aunt Alexandra (Atticus's sister), (Jem) Jeremy (The oldest of Atticus's two children), (Scout) Jean Louise (The youngest of the two. She also try’s to be a boy by doing boy things) and their black maid Calpurnia. They live on the main residential street in town. There are many other people living in Maycomb, who all seem to know each other very well like one big family. There are some characters that are excluded from this family, such as the Radley’s. They are a dark family surrounded by rumors and different stories.

Apart from this aspect of Maycomb, the rest of the town is very quiet and dreary as explained in the first few chapters. Here is what Harper Lee tells us:

“Maycomb was an old town, but it was a tired old town when I first knew it. In rainy weather the streets turned to red slop; grass grew on the sidewalks, the courthouse sagged in the square.”

He then goes on to describe how the Great Depression effected the city:

“People moved slowly then. They ambled across the square, shuffled in and out of the stores around ...